


Saturdays

by fmo



Category: Captain America (Movies), Captain America - All Media Types, Marvel (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Amnesia, Comfort, Food, Homelessness
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-07-29
Updated: 2014-07-29
Packaged: 2018-02-10 21:43:18
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,221
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2041290
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fmo/pseuds/fmo
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>They meet at a soup kitchen. Neither of them knows their name, but one of them goes by Steve.</p><p>Or: falling in love and living with poverty in 2014, not 1939.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Saturdays

**Author's Note:**

> This fic deals with the topic of homelessness. I tried hard not to sensationalize or romanticize this topic; I did a fair amount of research and tried to present it accurately. If you find anything that's incorrect or that you want me to know about, please tell me!
> 
> I wrote this fic because I've seen a lot of "struggling with poverty" 1940s fics and I was interested in updating that scenario to the modern day. There are a lot of people in homeless shelters in NYC who do have jobs, but their wages are so low that they still can't make the cost of housing. Sometimes the lack of a support network (e.g. family or friends to fall back on in a rough patch, for whatever reason) can also mean the difference between going homeless or not.
> 
> Please see the end of the fic for notes also!

He went to the soup kitchen for lunch, more because it was raining than for the food. He had a roll of bills in his pocket—a lucky grab from a raincoat squeezed next to him on the subway in the morning rush hour. That would take care of food for a while. So he hadn’t needed to go to the soup kitchen, but it was raining hard and this was just a dry place where he was allowed to be. Someplace where nobody was looking, someplace where he could be lost for a little while among the mob of other people in hats and coats filling up the plain, cream-walls-and-plastic room. He just had to find somewhere to sit that was far enough away from anyone else.

The only problem was the arm. It wasn’t working well again, and it was hard to hold the tray with everything—

All at once, the power to the arm cut and his left hand dropped. Everything on the tray slid left, and then someone else’s hand appeared and held the tray steady. A big hand, big arm, and the guy attached to it said, “Hey, you got it?”

He wanted to say yes, but he didn’t have it. He could feel the shuddering from the arm starting up again, or whatever it did. “Need a second,” he said, shaking out the hand like a person with a real injured arm would do.

“It’s okay,” the guy said easily, like he wasn’t bothered holding the tray for a minute longer. This guy was tall, maybe an inch or two taller than him, but with a kind face that didn’t seem to fit with the force visible in his shoulders, in his chest and arms. Everything about the man said _threat_ except that face, which was easier to read than a book. 

“You wanna just sit here?” the guy was saying, forehead wrinkled. 

It would have been more difficult to walk away. The arm was just working enough for him to hold up the tray by himself and sit on the plastic chair across the table from the man who wasn’t a threat, so he did. If the man bothered him too much, he thought, he could always leave. For now, he started on the food: soup and half a cheese sandwich today, plus a box with juice and a straw like he saw children drinking sometimes on the street.

The guy across from him held out his hand. “My name’s Steve, by the way,” he said. 

Steve. The name seemed to fit. He shook the hand, because it seemed the thing to do, and said, “Don’t have a name.” Usually when people in stores asked, he gave them a fake one. But this was the truth. He must have had one once. Everyone did, didn’t they? Everyone had to have parents once, and everyone got given a name. He must have done too. But if he’d known once, he didn’t any more.

Steve looked sad at this, but just said, “Anything your buddies call you?”

“No,” he said. No buddies at all. “Anything is fine.”

“Okay,” Steve said. 

They ate for a while, as the room got humid from all the people and the drying rain and the soup, and mostly it was loud enough with talking and clankings from the kitchen that it didn’t feel awkward to just sit quietly. After a while Steve peeled apart his sandwich to look at the cheese. “I don’t know how they got it to not taste of anything,” he said, puzzling. “Doesn’t cheese naturally taste kind of cheesy?”

It was a little bit funny, just the look on Steve’s face. “It’s special cheese from a factory,” he said, because this was something he knew. He’d seen packages in dumpsters. “It doesn’t even say cheese on it, it says processed cheese flavored slices.”

Steve was floored by this. “Isn’t it easier just to make cheese the normal way? Or do people like it without a taste? Hey, quit laughing at me.” But Steve was smiling, and it was a nice smile, and made his eyes wrinkle underneath in a nice way.

“I don’t know,” he said, in answer to Steve’s question. He really didn’t. The bread didn’t taste of bread either, or maybe it was he wasn’t tasting things right.

He ate it all up, though, and so did Steve. Even the soup that tasted mostly of salt, and the juice that tasted mostly of sugar. It would have been so good, he thought, to have a piece of pie made by somebody's hands, or some cake right out of the oven. Not that—well, he’d had pie and cake from a lot of bakeries, sometimes bought and sometimes from trash and once given by a sympathetic person behind the counter, but he didn’t remember ever having had cake right out of the oven. The idea of it, though.

When the room was beginning to clear, Steve put all his things together on his tray again and said, “Look, I don’t mean to be—what I mean is, you’re not at Bellevue, are you?”

Bellevue. His heart started pounding. That was the psychiatric hospital. Why would, why would Steve think he was there.

“I mean the, the 30th Street Men’s Shelter,” Steve said.

“Shelter.” Shelter didn’t mean bus shelter, or bomb shelter. Steve meant a homeless shelter.

“Yeah, the shelter in the old Bellevue hospital. You don’t know it,” Steve said, realizing. “Well, I just asked because I am. Living there.” Steve said the last part steadily.

A lot of do-gooders had tried to persuade him to go to the PATH center and get into the shelter system. He had a fake I.D., that was okay, but it was the arm. There were always metal detectors, or fingerprints, or people who wanted to see his arms for track marks, or something. And then there were interviews where they asked him questions and started getting suspicious. He couldn’t.

“I can’t go to shelters,” he said.

“Oh," Steve said. "Yeah, with them it’s not always—easy. I know people who've left." He shook his head. “They need to do something about some of those places. I write people a lot. Congresspeople, senators, the mayor.”

He wanted to ask Steve more about what he wrote, but the room was getting empty, and he didn’t want to draw attention to himself, so he stood up with his tray. “I come here sometimes though,” he said.

Following suit, Steve stood and took his tray back to the counter for dirty dishes. “I always come here on Saturdays,” Steve said. “Don’t have work then.”

The roll of bills was heavy in his pocket. He bought rooms when he could, always cheap ones in places with no security cameras, to shower or sleep with a little more security. Other times, he broke into apartments with “for sale” signs or abandoned buildings, and plenty of times he just slept outside, wherever he could best find a hidden safe place. Sometimes he got a job for a day or two, cash in hand. Mostly, though, his life happened outside the workings of the ordinary world. But in some way it reassured him that Steve had work. He didn’t want to think that Steve lived like he did.

He wasn’t sure what the right way to say goodbye was, but Steve just said, “Maybe I’ll see you sometime,” and gave a little wave. He found himself returning the wave before he could think about it.

The rain had eased up, so he headed out to go nowhere and saw Steve leave in the other direction, hands in his pockets and shoulders hunched like Steve thought it could make him less massive and broad than he was. It didn’t.

* 

He was careful to keep track of the days that week. That was hard because the soup kitchen had messed him up. Maybe it was just because it was conversation, having lunch. Something he’d seen people do a lot but not something he’d ever done himself.  But he also thought maybe it was Steve. He had a lot of thoughts that week that he couldn’t trace back to the source; once he’d thought of making beef broth, even though he couldn’t remember ever doing it. If he had, it would be better than most things he did remember. It seemed like something a good person would do. He hoped it was a memory.

 The next Saturday he went back to the same soup kitchen and Steve was there. He was a little later this time, so Steve was with friends, but when Steve saw him he beckoned him over and moved a little apart from the group so they could talk together.

He found out that Steve worked in a “big warehouse” (“At least I can lift a lot,” Steve said), forty hours a week. It was a good wage, Steve said, better than minimum because of the strenuous work, but it was still so hard to find an apartment. Even the smallest ones were eight hundred or a thousand dollars a month, which seemed like an incredible amount to him too, and then you needed to put money down to start for a deposit. “Plus, I don’t have a credit rating,” Steve said.

“What’s that?” he asked.

“It’s a . . . it means did you ever pass any bad checks, or did you take out a loan and not pay it back. It’s like your financial history.”

 “Why don’t you have one?” Steve didn’t seem like the type to write a bad check or not pay back a loan.

“Well,” Steve said, tilting his head and drawing the word out into a sigh. Then he said, “This is a wild story, but I don’t really know who I am. They found me passed out by the docks and brought me into the hospital. No identification on me, all I was wearing was a real beat-up set of overalls, looked like I’d just crawled out of the bottom of the Hudson. They said I had some symptoms of starvation as well as dehydration, and a lot of weird stuff they couldn’t ever figure out. I was in there for a while, but I never remembered, and they never could match me with any missing persons. So here I am.”

He thought for a minute. “So where’d you get your name?”

“Picked it,” Steve said with a touch of pride. He bit into his sandwich. “I was John Doe for a time, but John didn’t fit.”

So they were in the same boat. He hadn’t thought that, but really he and Steve were in the same boat, wild stories and all. But Steve had picked his own name. “If you were gonna pick a name for me,” he said slowly, “what would you pick?”

Steve gave the question appropriate thought. “I think James,” he said at last. Then Steve laughed at his expression. “You don’t like it?”

James, he thought. It didn’t really feel like _his_. It was formal; it sounded like some old guy’s name. But at least it was short. “You can call me that,” he said.

“Okay,” Steve said, trying not to look surprised. It was sweet. “Okay.”

*

As fall turned into winter and then spring again, Saturdays became the axle of James' world, and everything else spun around them. Even in the snowstorms and icestorms, when the sidewalks weren't shoveled and walking on them was more like climbing, he climbed the snowbanks and made it to the soup kitchen all the same. If the rest of the week could be like Saturdays, wouldn't life be easy, he thought. But then maybe it was better to store up time and wait for Saturday to come, a reward for getting through all the rest.

He found that Steve knew a lot of people. Each time he went, people were always saying hi to Steve, but Steve always stayed sitting with James despite that. They ate together, and Steve told him things about his life, about his roommates in Bellevue and his co-workers and the things he saw when he walked around the city on his days off. Steve said he couldn’t figure out if he was from New York or not; sometimes he felt like he knew a street, and then other times it might as well have been the surface of Mars. Steve said when he had a place of his own he wanted to try getting old furniture and sanding it down and repainting it, see if he could do that. Maybe he'd try growing a plant in a pot by the window—maybe basil, or tomatoes if it was warm enough. The way he described it, it sounded so good that James found himself thinking about it one night when he sat by the river. A bed of his own, with sheets just from the laundry. Clean clothes. Food that he could eat with Steve—not just eating, but having breakfast or lunch or dinner. He'd learned the difference.

When he thought of Steve, he tried to steal less, but it was impossible to get an above-board job without an address and a phone, and he wouldn’t get a phone because he thought maybe Hydra could track it. Maybe they couldn’t, but he’d made it two years now by doing every thing he could think of to keep them from finding him. Nothing was worth the risk of being found. Not after two years, not now that he had someplace to be every week.

Another risk, which came with the weather warming up, was the arm. He wouldn’t go into public without all of it covered, but then in hot weather it overheated. That might be why it was breaking. In cold weather, it wasn’t so bad, but in summer sometimes he couldn’t go out in the daytime.

On the first Saturday in June, the mercury went into the 90s and James couldn’t even get on the subway to get to the soup kitchen, and couldn't finish the journey walking in the midday sun either. The arm was whirring, louder than it had been before, loud enough for people to notice, and it was burning hot to the touch. He had to break into a closed-up office building, peel off his shirt and glove and put wet paper towels on the arm and ice out of the freezer in the kitchen, and even then the skin on his shoulder was red and raw. There were clocks on the wall, he knew the time, but even after his arm cooled down it was no good. By the time he got to the soup kitchen it would have heated up under his sleeve again and he’d end up making a scene, trying to find a place to cool it down.

He had to watch the clock tick the hours away.

The next week the arm wasn’t working well again, but at least it was cool enough that a loose button shirt and a glove didn’t make the arm overheat that badly. He got to the kitchen earlier than usual, which meant the line was shorter and he had already managed to get himself seated by the time Steve appeared with his tray. He didn’t know what would happen next; he’d never missed a Saturday before.

“James!” Steve said, calling to him from across the room. James waved, and Steve came over and sat down, breathless. “Hi,” Steve said. Since the weather had turned warmer, Steve had left off the sweatshirts and just wore t-shirts with his jeans and sneakers. The shirts were usually too tight in the shoulders and too long and big in the waist, which showed off how powerful Steve's body was; once that would have made James more wary, but it had been a long time since Steve had seemed like a threat at all. Now he was just Steve. 

“Hi,” James said.

Steve said, “You okay?” He’d obviously noticed that James wasn’t using his left arm to eat.

“Arm’s not good today,” he said.

Steve got that look on his face, the one where he knew things weren’t right but didn’t know a way to fix it. Steve probably thought James couldn’t afford the doctor; well, that was true enough, even if it wasn’t exactly the problem. “Anything I can do?” he said. 

“No,” James said. "Don't worry about it."

They started on the sandwiches, which had some kind of meat in. Easy enough to eat one-handed, at least. “Hey, James,” Steve said, in a tone that said he’d been sitting on the idea for a while. “I wanted to ask you something.”

This, James had been waiting for. Questions about his arm, or his life before. “Yeah,” he said.

“Place where I work is hiring. It’s not for what I do, it’s just for scanning packages. Like, with a—“ Steve made a gesture, like the people scanning barcodes with a hand-held machine in the corner store. James nodded, and Steve went on. “Maybe you’d want to apply.”

Nobody had ever said something like this to him before. Steve had obviously tried to find a job that he could do. “I don’t have an address,” James said.

“That’s the second part,” Steve said. He started to tear the crust off his sandwich, which wasn’t a usual habit of his. “I found a place and I’m moving in on Sunday. It’s no palace, you know, really just two rooms and not much of a kitchen, but it’s nine hundred a month. And I wondered if you wanted to go in with me. I worked it out and I can make the rent on my own, if I keep the groceries pretty low. So you don’t have to worry about that. But if you came, maybe you could find some kind of work too. It’s okay if you can’t, but if you did—well, it could be nice. I don’t want to rattle around alone in there anyway.”

James didn’t know what to say. It was like the first time Steve had told him about not knowing who he was. That time, everything about the way he saw Steve had changed. Now it had all changed again. “You don’t even know me,” he said.

 “I don’t know _me_ either,” Steve pointed out.

James couldn’t help but laugh. “Okay,” he said. If it was a choice between living with Steve or not, well, how could he choose not to? Anyway, even if he didn’t get the job Steve had set up, he had to find some kind of work to help Steve out. As long as he had the address to use, he’d find something and split the rent so it wasn’t all on Steve. This was Steve’s dream; he didn’t want to see it get lost. 

*

As they’d arranged, James waited outside Bellevue on Sunday afternoon for Steve to come out. Sometimes he asked himself the same thing Steve said he’d wondered about: was he from this city? He knew where he’d been kept, sometimes in Europe, in Germany, a long time in Russia, and then in the USA last of all. But he’d wanted to come to New York. He’d thought, in a way, that they would look for him here, and he’d come anyway. But this place, Bellevue. He felt like he’d heard stories about it. Even standing in its shadow felt wrong. It was high and old and brick-walled, just respectable enough to be frightening. He’d been in a lot of old respectable places that were worse inside than places people thought of as dangerous.

He adjusted his own duffle bag of stuff on his shoulder—mostly clothes, and the weapons he’d had on the day he’d got away, which he’d never used since. And all the cash James had, including a solid sum from pawning one of the Winter Soldier’s knives the day before (the guns were unusual enough to get someone’s attention; the knife wasn’t noticeable). Enough that he could contribute, for now.

At last, Steve came out with a huge trash bag in his arms and a smaller bag (with old books, in, of course, James saw when he looked) that he gave to James. “That’s it,” he said, looking back for a second at the building towering above them.

“C’mon,” James said, putting his hand on Steve’s back. And they left Bellevue.

It was a day full of firsts. The first time he’d seen Steve on a Sunday, the first time he’d sat next to anyone that he knew on the subway. The first time he’d carried someone else’s things for them.

Steve had been a little abashed when he opened the door to the apartment, but it was just like Steve had described it, and James hadn’t been expecting any better than he saw. It was tiny and old and the kitchen was just a two-burner thing that hooked up to the wall and a sink and a small refrigerator like James had seen sometimes in hotel rooms. There were no signs of bugs or rats anywhere, though, and it smelled clean enough, and most of all it was Steve’s. James had been there all those months Steve had saved for the deposit; he'd given pieces of himself to get this place, and that made it important. There was a lot of empty floor around them even with how small the space was, but James would find some way to make money that Steve would think well of, and then he'd help fill that space up, with bookshelves or chairs or whatever Steve wanted.

But Steve was already putting his bag down and turning to look around him, so James came in and took his baseball cap off, pushing his sweaty hair back with his right hand. He was about to put it back on again, but then it was his apartment, after all, so he didn't need to hide his face. In absence of a hat rack, he put it on the floor by the door instead.

They’d agreed before to share the bed that came with the room, a compromise reached after Steve had offered to sleep in his sleeping bag on the ground and then James had offered the same thing. “I’ve slept close enough next to other guys in the dormitory,” Steve had said. So they made the bed together with the ugly patterned sheets Steve had bought at a thrift store, put the clothes and the books in neat stacks on the floor, and then it was hot enough even with the window open that Steve said he wanted to see if the shower worked.

From the sounds of the shower, it seemed like it did. James stuck his head out of the window (no screen—if he got the job he wanted to get one of those too) and looked out at the city. His arm was whirring away again, and he knew Steve was about to notice it, but despite that things seemed . . . right. Steve’s books were by the bed, and that was right, and he could hear Steve splashing in the tiny bathroom, and that was right, and the city was out there, huge and hot in the evening. And that was right too.

It was only a short time later that Steve came back, damp but dressed in a t-shirt and shorts, and James took his turn after, washing up and then just running cold water over the arm to cool it down. It was time, anyway. Better to do it before it was too late.

So he put on pants of his own, but not a shirt, pushed his hair out of his face with his fingers, and found Steve lying on the bed on his stomach and reading one of his books. The bulb in the ceiling didn’t brighten the room much, so Steve had his face close to the book so he could see it. He seemed very intent, and for a minute James thought it would make much more sense somehow if he was just a thin little guy in that pose.

Then he shook the idea out of his head and said, “Hey, Steve. I need to explain something.” It went against everything he’d taught himself to stand there with all of the arm bare, but they were going to live together. If Steve let him stay, Steve would see it anyway, so better to show it all now.

Steve looked up, dropped the book, and said, “Oh.” He didn’t look horrified, though, just surprised. He sat up so that he was cross-legged with his back against the headboard.  “Do you wanna sit down?”

James sat in the same position, so that he was next to Steve with his left arm closest. “You have questions?” he said.

“A little bit,” Steve said. “Do you want to just” —a small shrug of those big shoulders—“tell me about it?”

James looked down at the ugly sheets. They really were from the seventies, all orange flowers. He remembered. “I was an experiment,” he said. He took a breath, tried to say more about the Red Room, about—about who he had been—he wanted to be honest with Steve about everything—but then Steve put his hand on his arm, just ordinarily as he would have with James’ other arm. 

“It’s okay,” Steve said. “You got a wild story too, you can tell me later.”

 James had to laugh again at that. It was only Steve who'd ever surprised him that way, got him to laugh when nothing was funny at all. But Steve did it all the time. “It overheats sometimes when I cover it up,” he said instead. “I think that’s why it’s breaking.”

Steve’s brow furrowed. “Shoot. I’m not bad with cars, but I don’t know anything about arms.”

James shook his head. “Unless you’re Howard Stark, I doubt you could do a lot.”

“Well. You don’t have to cover it up now, you know,” Steve said.

James sat back a little easier against the headboard. “Thanks," he said.

They still had to go get dinner, though, so he had to cover it up again for that; even more, it wasn't worth the risk of anyone spotting a metal arm. As the evening came in and chased out the day, they walked to the grocery store that Steve had scoped out down the street. It was a little ways from the apartment, but not so unpleasant with the sun lower and a bit of a breeze; James started to think he understood why Steve liked walking around the city so much.

James had been into grocery stores before, of course, so he wasn’t expecting it to be different with Steve. But, of course, it was; everything was. He wasn’t buying just one thing to eat on the sidewalk outside. They were planning for meals; Steve said they needed butter for everything, and eggs because they couldn't get meat, and then they compared bags of rice and boxes of pasta and loaves of bread to see what would be the cheapest to go with it. It was a whole routine. And he was starting to realize how much more they needed: they needed sponges and dishsoap to wash the two beat-up pans (also from a thrift store) that Steve had brought, and they needed plates, salt and pepper, and forks and knives, and hundreds more things. In the end, they bought the least they could, and stayed under budget, even if it meant not having any forks or knives or spoons yet.

They went back to the apartment again; James switched the long-sleeved shirt for an undershirt he usually wore for warmth in winter and watched Steve coax the little burner into heat and then fry eggs and then bread in a pan over it for fried egg sandwiches.

“I’m not exactly a cook,” Steve said as he handed the first one over to James. James thought it didn’t even matter, because his stomach was aching (he was always hungry, just sometimes he didn’t think about it), but after the first bite—it did matter. The sandwich didn’t have the taste of frost or preservatives on it. It was savory, and buttery, and crisp, and Steve had left the yolk just a little runny, and the flavor of that made a kind of tingle at the back of James’ nose, but it was good. And he hadn’t paid for it or stolen it either; Steve had made it for him.

“Best sandwich I ever had,” James said.

Steve beamed and started on his own sandwich.

The sun went down, and they did homely things like listening to one another brush their teeth and arguing over who got what side of the bed. Each moment felt like a luxury. In the night, in the never-ending glow of the city that came in through the bare window, washing the room in oranges and blues, everything felt soft and gentle that had once been hard and harsh: the clean sheets, the soft bed, the smells of soap and shampoo and Steve next to him. Even the light felt kinder here than outside on the street. The breeze from the window was just enough to make the warm night feel good.

“Steve,” he said. “Thank you.”

The sheets rustled next to him as Steve shifted position. “It’s okay. You’re my friend.”

It wasn’t just the words, but the way Steve said them. Like this was just a fact of the world. In a way, James thought, it was. “Same,” he said.

There was the sound of an ambulance outside at a distance, and then closer to their building the growl of a motorbike starting up.

“What would you do, if you could do anything?” Steve asked him, lying on his back with an arm behind his head. “If you won the lottery, or something. Where would you go?”

“If I won the lottery?” James looked at the outline of Steve’s face. He knew him. Last year, they’d been strangers but now he knew the inside and the outside of Steve, and all the things he’d learned were good. He’d never known anyone and liked them before—seen all the parts of them and been surprised in a good way. It would be a hard act to follow, he thought, for anyone to be better than Steve. After all the things that had happened to James in the past he wanted to forget, the day had come when he'd gone to get out of the rain and met Steve without even meaning to.

“Yeah?” Steve prompted. He yawned. 

“I’d stay here,” James said, trying to picture it. “I’d buy an apartment for us, a high up one so you could see down over everything and draw it.”

“I forgot I told you I liked to draw,” Steve said, sounding sleepy.

James didn’t remember Steve saying that either, but he must have; maybe it was months ago. “What would you do?”

But whatever Steve said was muffled, and James could hear his breathing evening out, so he let Steve sleep on the answer. He would ask him again tomorrow.

 

**Author's Note:**

> Bellevue is a real NYC homeless shelter. An interesting article about it is here: http://www.capitalnewyork.com/article/culture/2011/07/2729277/bleak-house-problem-some-new-york-shelters-people-have-sleep-there
> 
> I realize that Steve absolutely benefits from numerous privileges (he's able to take on extra hours of physically demanding work and not get injured; he's white, cis, and male; he doesn't have kids; and more) that help him in his quest to get work and get out of the shelter system. 
> 
> If you research shelters, you may find that a lot of them have "check-in" and "check-out" times that are also a problem for people who have jobs that mean they have to be out beyond those times. Bellevue doesn't seem to have that for longer-term residents, so Steve is fortunate there.
> 
> Finally, please comment! I would like to hear your thoughts.
> 
> Come say hi to me at fmowrites.tumblr.com, and if you found this fic through a rec, please tell me! I love to hear about being recced.


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